


Assembly

by h0ldthiscat



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 18:41:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5344508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/h0ldthiscat/pseuds/h0ldthiscat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Why Ikea, Scully?”</p>
<p>“It’s cheap, it’s easy to put together, and I like seeing you work with your hands,” she confesses, a knowing smile lurking in the corner of her mouth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Assembly

“Alright, two hours,” she says as they ascend the escalator. “We can find all this in two hours.”

Mulder snatches the list from her, squinting to read her small, neat, printed letters. “‘Leather couch.’ Do they sell real leather here?”

She shrugs. “Don’t they?”

“We’ve been on the road a long time, Thelma, I don’t know if you’re thinking this through.” He slips into a poor imitation of Susan Sarandon and she gives him a playful shove. “Why Ikea, Scully?”

“It’s cheap, it’s easy to put together, and I like seeing you work with your hands,” she confesses, a knowing smile lurking in the corner of her mouth. 

“Is that why you’ve been nagging me about that sagging porch step?” he asks, grabbing them a crinkly yellow bag and a golf pencil from a kiosk at the top of the escalator. 

“That, and I’ve caught my shoe in between the slats about a hundred times now,” she remembers bitterly.

“So wear different shoes,” he suggests good-naturedly. 

“If I wear different shoes I can’t do this,” she says, tilting her head to kiss him messily on the jaw. 

“Comment retracted.”

“I thought so.”

“So a leather sofa, huh? Trying to conjure up days of old?”

She stiffens but is still smiling. “Mulder, I miss a lot of things about the old days, but what I don’t miss at all is that damn overstuffed couch of yours.”

“Best couch I ever had,” he sighs wistfully. 

“I’m not interested in looking back, but I’m sure we can find one we like here. Mulder?” She looks over her shoulder and finds him studying a tag on a set of dressers.

“Malm,” he reads, rolling the Swedish word around in his mouth. “How do you think they name these things?”

“Who knows?”

“Hey Malm, can we go to Ikea?” 

Scully winces at the terribleness of his joke and pulls him along. They wind their way through the display rooms, purposefully spartan and intentionally streamlined. 

“Where was this when I was in college?” she asks, looking at a sad futon and a spineless desk lamp. 

“Buried under a lace doily, probably.”

She glares at him. “Doilies are nice, Mulder. Sometimes!”

“Sure. What about this one?” He points at an L-shaped sofa covered in a beige textured fabric. 

She shrugs and says in a small voice, “I want leather.”

Mulder looks around the sea of bold prints and straight lines and sees a dark green couch with a similar footprint to the one that used to take up a wall in his living room. “I don’t know if we’re going to find leather here but that one looks comfy.”

She shrugs. “It’s all right.”

“What else is on the list?” He glances back down. She steps in closer than she needs to to have a look. He doesn’t mind at all. “Blankets and throws,” he reads.

Scully plops down in a staged living room and pulls on the patterned blanket from across the back of couch. “This one’s soft,” she says, pulling it around her. 

She looks impossibly small, he thinks. She’s finally gaining back some of the weight she lost when they were on the road, but her cheeks are still hollow and her hipbones jut out when she’s lying flat on her back. Under the throw she could be a child.

He remembers wrapping her up a lifetime ago, covering her with the horsehair blanket he’d bought on one of his many trips to New Mexico in his twenties, when alien hunting was what he did in his spare time instead of for a living. He remembers how beautiful she’d been that night, how seeing her after being in England for a few days had been a breath of fresh air he hadn’t known he needed. He remembers that her skin was warm under his lips when she’d come to bed at 4AM, stretching herself out over him and saying, “Hello.”

“Mulder?” she asks, brow furrowed.

He shakes his head. “Nothing. Come on, let’s look at kitchen stuff.” 

Reluctantly she extricates herself from the blanket, and almost instantly she sees something she likes, staged on a countertop that boasts its scratch-resistance. “Look Mulder, a salad spinner!”

“We don’t need a salad spinner, Scully,” he says, waving the thin piece of paper in his hand. “It’s not on the list.”


End file.
